Back in the Before Times — and this time I’m talking about back before the turn of the millennium — we used to have bike messengers downtown (San Francisco, but I assume most other cities).

In the 80s and 90s, it used to be considered a relatively punk job, if you had to have a job. Your typical bike messenger had a lot of tattoos, a non-conforming haircut, and was kind of an asshole. Different groups had their own zines. They helped get Critical Mass off the ground. Some of them rode fixies. They ran red lights and sometimes rode on the sidewalk. They were almost all male. I’ve dated more than one person who used to be a bike messenger. It was… a type.

You used to see them zipping all over the city, and at lunch time, congregating in a few specific places, like that building that used to be a Shaper Image (the photo below is from foundsf.org):

This was back in the day when many documents required “wet-ink” signatures, and part of the job of any law firm’s staff was calling up a bike messenger to have documents delivered several blocks away. It was an essential service.

But then then the use of Docusign became widely accepted, even with financial services companies and other old-school holdouts. There was a pandemic. Electric mopeds became available and affordable. Here in 2025, I no longer see bike messengers downtown (or at least, they’re not congregating in places where I might see them).

What I do see is a lot of people on electric mopeds with the square boxes on the back. I believe they’re mostly delivering food. They don’t seem to hang out together or have a culture, although they do still run red lights and ride on the sidewalk.

Part of my desire to re-start a text blog was to write down things that might be forgotten by history, that I personally experienced. So that’s what this post is, I guess. I was there when bike messengers were cool.